Malaysia: The Return of the E & E Sector

Trade figures, released yesterday (5 June) by the International Trade and Industry Ministry showed total exports in April rose 26.6% year-on-year to RM52.03bil, while imports surged by 27% to RM42.8bil.

Moreover, trade in April this year expanded by 26.7% to RM94.83bil, compared with April last year.

Trade surplus was valued at RM9.22bil, making it the 150th consecutive month of trade surplus since November 1997.

On a month-on-month basis, exports and imports decreased by 12.4% and 5.1% respectively. Total trade was 9.3% lower.

The increase in exports in April of RM10.92bil from a year ago was largely attributed to higher exports of electrical and electronic products (E&E), which increased by 21.6% or RM3.67bil, crude petroleum (93% or RM1.35bil) , chemicals and chemical products (26.2% or RM698.1mil), refined petroleum products (50.4% or RM644.9mil) and liquefied natural gas (33.2% or RM643,5mil).

Singapore, China, the United States, Japan and Hong Kong were the top five export destinations, accounting for 51.4% of Malaysia’s total exports.

Total imports in April increased by 27% to RM42.8bil from April 2009 due mainly to higher imports of intermediate goods.

Total trade during the period January to April increased by 31% to RM373.32bil.

During the same period, exports increased by 29.7% to RM210.74bil, while imports rose 32.8% to RM162.58bil, resulting in a trade surplus of RM48.15bil.

RAM Holdings Bhd group chief economist Dr Yeah Kim Leng said the export and import figures fell slightly below RAM’s expectation.

Yeah said for April the increase in exports of 26.6% year-on-year was on the lower end of RAM’s expectation, which was range bound between 25% to 30%, while the increase in imports for April of 27% year-on-year was also within the lower range of RAM’s expectation bewteen 25% to 35%.


Yeah said it was difficult to gauge Malaysia’s trade performance over one month.

“Going forward, RAM expects Malaysia’s trade performance to improve further over the next four to six months,” he said.

RHB economist Peck Boon Soon also said Malaysia’s trade figures for April fell below RHB’s expectations.

“For exports, we expected an increase of 30% and imports an increase of 32%,” he said.

Going forward, Peck said there were worrying global economic trends could dampen demand.

“The Euro debt crisis is still on-going and demand from China, especially retailing end is slowing down and may potentially have an adverse effect on exports level worldwide, including Malaysia,” he said.

Ascot Sports: Is This the Tipping Point?

There has been too much brouhaha for Vincent Tan.

Angered by the conspiracy theorists that he has been bankrolling BN's by-elections thus far and that the sports gambling license is  BN's payback to him, Vincent Tan has decided to give away all the proceeds of the 70% sale of RM525 million to Berjaya Corp Berhad. He will continue to have his remaining 30%.

But is this the tipping point?

Will the parties who at adamant about the ban of the sports license be appeased?. To me, it is a positive negative here. They will go for the jugular and finally BN will have to pull back the licence to the grimace of the Berjaya Corp shareholders and the Better Malaysia Foundation.

I think this is one stormy cloud for magnate-tycoon Vincent Tan with a silver lining for the Malaysian people.

In this episode, the people will likely win against big government and corporate wheeling-dealing.

What’s love got to do with it?

I am pasting Tay Tian Yan's interesting story about sex and teachers.

Let's have some fun.

"I really had no clue how to give this article a proper title.

Should I just put it forthright: To be a good teacher, learn how to make love first?

Or: I’m a good teacher, and I make love every night?

If I did, I would have been smashed up by teachers and their spouses.

But what else could I say? This is the real thing! Kisah benar!

Two days ago, 41-year-old male teacher Alias Ismail, winner of the Tokoh Nilam award for outstanding teacher, revealed the secret recipe of his success. He said he derived his vitality and focus in teaching from, you guess, reading and sex!

Reading and making love every night, and the love-making always comes after the reading!

I have the slightest hint what these two things have got to do with each other.

For other people, the following might be the reality:

“Darling, what’re you reading now?”

“I’m reading XXX. What about you, babe. Are you reading something?”

“Put that down, honey! Roll over quickly!”

So, to ordinary people, reading and love-making do not seem to get along so well with each other, unless you are holding hard porn in your hands before going to bed.

But with the advent of CDs, DVDs and things like that, even this remaining possible linkage is now annulled.

It is not easy to emulate Mr and Mrs Alias for a number of reasons.

Firstly, people usually drift into dreamland having flipped a few pages, too exhausted for anything else including sex.

Secondly, if love-making is on the agenda, there is absolutely no place for reading mood.

As if that is not enough, these two things are physically and mentally exhausting, and the engagement in either of them could potentially kill the second day’s vibrance.

But our Cikgu Alias accomplishes both these daunting tasks, and still stays physically and mentally active over time.

Wait a minute! It shouldn’t go this way. Alias is a role model among teachers, someone the students should emulate and learn from.

But he is telling everyone that half his achievement has been attributed to his daily love-making routine.

Should other teachers and his pupils take the cue from him?

As a teacher par excellence, a prominent figure in the education sector, he should have shared his teaching experience instead, for example, how to advance holistic education and how to prevent our schools from turning into “hell schools” like the one in Rawang, among many other things.

What he must not divulge to the public is the contribution of his daily night-time feats towards teaching excellence.

If he has some special liking in certain fields, that will constitute wholly his personal undertaking.

Common sense tells us that there is no correlation between these two things.

Alias’ logic has been built upon the society’s misconception about sex. Many people are only partially informed of regular sex, resulting in a lot of exaggeration, distortion and misinformation.

Ubiquitous love potion ads on lamp posts and road signs, the aphrodisiac effects emphasised by coffee drinks, the open sale of X-rated pornography and cheap and fanciful love that abounds in our midst. And to top it all, we now have a model teacher-turned-sex sales master.

Perhaps, Alias should take up an offer to speak for Tongkat Ali products, but where education is concerned, he has been talking nothing but trash. And from the medical perspective, he should consult a physician, or a psychologist, to get his indulgence fixed. — mysinchew.com"

Walla! There you have it. A tall story?

Wilmar: Who Did the Boo-Boo?

Jakarta(2/6/2010)

Wilmar International Ltd. (Wilmar), the world’s largest palm oil trader, is being investigated by the Indonesian tax office over fictitious value added tax (VAT) refunds said tax director-general M Tjiptardjo, the top tax official said Tuesday. The taxes in question are from the period of 2007-2008.

Wilmar has denied the company ever falsified its tax returns.

“Questions of fictitious or false claims made by the group do not arise.Internal records in respect of the VAT refund claims vis-a-vis export sales will stand scrutiny,” Wilmar had said in a statement to the Singapore stock exchange on May 19.

Wilmar said it was entitled to receive VAT refunds after it “exported more than US$3 billion worth of palm oil in each of the last three financial years”.

Lawmaker Bambang Soesatyo said on May 18 he received a report from an unidentified tax official that Wilmar received VAT refunds worth Rp 800 billion ($87.2 million) in 2007 and Rp 900 billion in 2008. The company was set to receive another refund worth Rp 1.9 trillion. 

Let's wait ans see who did the boo-boo.

We Are Billionaires/Millionaires: No Need for University Degrees

Well, with skills, talents, an innovative mind and good business sense,perhaps luck too, these ten men made it to the top of the pile without a university education.

Who are they?

 Bill Gates- Microsoft

Steve Jobs-Apple Computers

Frank Lloyd Wright- Architect

Buckminster Fuller-Architect and Inventor

 James Cameron-Director

Mark Zuckerberg-Facebook

Tom Hanks-Actor

Harrison Ford

Lady Gaga

Tiger Woods-Golf Pro

Rafidah: Political Wisdom?

Rafidah Aziz has advised the Barisan Nasional leadership against repeating past mistakes, by listening to the voters and not party members when selecting candidates for the next general elections.

I think this is one good advice coming from this doyen in a long, long time. I sometimes wonder whether she took her own advice when she was surfing the political waters as Wanita UMNO chieftain.

She said too many good candidates had been axed during Election 2008 because of this policy.

“In the next general election, what we really need are good candidates, the right candidates, winnable candidates.“To get this, we must listen to the people, not the party members,” she said. On the dot, my dear lady, on the dot!

The outspoken leader pointed out that many party members had their own personal agenda to achieve, which could prove to be detrimental to Barisan Nasional (BN) at large.

“If you ask only them (the party members) on who should contest next, they might say the present representative needs to be removed.

“Of course they would say this. Why? Because there is usually already someone else there, waiting in the wings to take over,” she said.

Rafidah said it was important for the leadership to start collecting grassroots feedback from all quarters of society, which includes both party members and the voters themselves.[Who is being task to do this? Is he or she morally upright?]

“Sometimes, the people like their representative. But this representative could not be popular among party members because he or she is maybe not too ‘party-centric’,” she said.

She explained that this may not sit well with the party members who felt that they have not been getting enough “largesse” from the disputed candidate. [ We need a mind-set change here!]

“So that is where the disparity of perception comes in. You ask the party members and they would say to change the candidate but when you speak to the people, they like their representative.

“But do not look at what the party members want alone — the people end up casting the votes in the end,” she said.

Without elaborating, Rafidah said that this had clearly happened during the last general election in March 2008.

The election had seen the Pakatan Rakyat parties of PAS, DAP and PKR unexpectedly rise to power when it swept up five states and denied BN its two-thirds majority in Parliament.

“Last election, too many changes were made without consideration on who these candidates were — whether they could be accepted by the public at large,” said Rafidah.

She commended Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak on his leadership to date but urged him to remind his “soldiers” in the government to strive harder to carry out his newborn initiatives.

“He has made real effort in consolidating the country, especially through his 1Malaysia concept.

“But more needs to be done. We need to go to the grassroots and explain to the people that this 1Malaysia not just about ‘one’ everything — one uniform, one murtabak.

“It is not just symbolism... it is about how we are all Malaysians and that despite our differences, we are held together by this one thread that is Malaysia,” Rafidah said.

She said that Najib seemed to understand what needed to be done to strengthen the country’s economy but pointed out that it was one thing to create approaches like the New Economic Model (NEM) and another to ensure that work was actually carried out.

“Having the NEM is one thing but making sure that things are done is another. To me, for any government of any time, there is nothing else but the ‘nose to the grindstone’ approach.[Hard work and clean conscience, my good dame!]

“Everyone in the administration must be diligent in achieving targets. All must be on their toes, there is no slacking, whether or not you are in the Cabinet or in the public service or in the education sector — you have to know your role and achieve your target,” said the former Cabinet Minister cum ex-economics lecturer in Universiti Malaya.

Rafidah added that the government needed to be stern in preventing detractors from politicising policies that were beneficial to the people. “Like the subsidy cuts for example. Do not let these detractors to politicise on it and divide the people because the cuts are for the good of the people. [Who says so? Not the poor. Not the impoverished salaried class!]

“As Malaysians, we owe it to ourselves to accept things that are good for us and the country so if we need to cut back on subsidies, then we must accept it and the government must explain to the people why,” she said.

I guess she is with Jala and suffering the blind spot malady too, in this instance!

The Cabinet in June 2010

The new Cabinet is an old Cabinet plus one new Minister.Ong Tee Kiat has got the tip of the boot and Chor has come in to take over Kong's portfolio. Kong moves to Transport.

We assume that PM Najib is happy with his Cabinet pre-June as except for the MCA replacement and transfer, every one stayed put.

Are we ready for the long haul now?